Army Staff Sgt. Jake Kessler ties a figure-8 knot into his harness rope as he prepares to climb a 50-foot rock with the heels of his prosthetic feet Feb. 2 at Sport Rock Indoor Climbing Center in Sterling, Va. Photo by William D. Moss(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

Strock, a 21-year-old Army private first class, and Kessler, a 36-year-old Army staff sergeant, are double-leg-amputee Iraq war veterans who forged a friendship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., during painful rehabilitation sessions.

A prosthetic specialist untied Strock’s pink shoelaces and removed her sneakers, revealing two rubber feet, which he unscrewed and replaced with a pair of carbon-fiber counterparts covered by rock-climbing shoes.

This was Strock's first rock climbing attempt since losing her legs.

On Nov. 24, 2005, Thanksgiving Day, Strock was patrolling a southern Baghdad area known as the “Triangle of Death” when her armored vehicle drove over an improvised explosive device.

“Two insurgents were apparently in the brush, and they had buried an IED in the middle of the road weeks before,” Strock said. “There was no way to see it and no way to know it was there. When we drove over it, they blew it.

“My team leader died instantly, I’m told. He got thrown through the door and out into some brush that was too tall for them to find him in,” Strock said. “It took about two hours to find him.”

The vehicle’s driver also died in the explosion. Strock, the .50-caliber gunner, survived.

Strock’s left femur was broken in multiple places and her right tibia, ankle and heel were severely damaged in the blast. Cranial swelling left her comatose. When she regained consciousness about a month later, Strock consented to below-knee amputation surgery.

Life with two metal legs began.

Six months later in Iraq, Kessler’s vehicle was patrolling a Ramallah street when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Stryker’s gunner hatch.

Kessler suffered two pelvic fractures, five fractures in his back and multiple broken ribs from the blast.

After the explosion, doctors amputated Kessler’s right leg below the knee and his left leg above the knee. A prosthetic knee joint and two titanium legs now stand in their places.

But Kessler and Strock refuse to let their situations keep them down.

In the summer of 2000, Kessler had 45 days free while he prepared to re-station in Alaska. He and his future wife spent nearly every one of those days rock climbing. “It cemented our friendship and created the beginnings of our relationship,” Vanessa said.

“Rock climbing takes perseverance and strength and patience,” she said. “It is kind of like puzzle solving.”

That summer, Vanessa and Jake discovered their lives were meant to fit together. The afternoon at the indoor center would be the first time the two climbed together since Kessler’s double amputation.

“Climbing is one of the passions I’ve wanted to get back to,” Kessler said. “Being able to get back here and climb is the first step of many.”

Sitting next to Kessler in a wheelchair here, Strock’s brunette hair sat in a bun above her grey, hooded sweatshirt. Her blue basketball shorts hung around the suction device that connects her real knees to her prosthetic legs.

“My goal for the day is to make it up the wall,” Strock said. “Once, at least. I’m either going to end up leaving here really angry with myself or really happy.”

Strock touched the new foot fixtures to confirm their stability. She stepped onto the climbing gym’s blue, matted floor and walked with a stuttered gait, like a woman on stilts, toward a 15-foot rock.

Surveying the wall briefly, she wrapped her fingers around two jutting rocks, known as holds, then hoisted a titanium leg off the blue mat.

“Get the meat of your foot on there,” Timmy O’Neill, an internationally renowned climber who assisted in the day’s climb, told Strock as she fought her way upward. “Yeah! Nice! Commit to it. I’ve got you.”

Strock climbed within one step of the rock’s apex when the suction device keeping her knee and prosthetic leg together loosened. As she lifted her knee toward the next-highest hold, the titanium leg detached and fell to the matted floor in a crash.

“Watch out for falling limbs!” she chided. Strock’s laughter masked her disappointment at failing to reach the top.

On an adjacent wall, Kessler, halfway up a 15-foot rock, struggled toward the top when his progress suddenly halted.

“He’s using so much more of the bicep,” Jeremy Hardin, Sport Rock Center’s “route setting” director, explained. “Climbing is supposed to be all about your legs.

“Jake can’t bend at the knee,” Hardin said, “so he is going to have to learn to adapt.”

Kessler rappelled to the rock base and lay flat on the blue mats. Beads of sweat dripped from his shaved head down the sides of his face; he breathed heavily. He was clearly exhausted.

“I can’t get a good grip with these feet,” Kessler told Zach Harvey, Walter Reed’s chief prostheticist, who volunteered at the event.

Harvey led Kessler and Strock back to their wheelchairs, where he modified their prostheses.

“It kind of sucks when you get up there and one of your limbs falls off,” Strock said as Harvey adjusted the suction device between her knee and leg. “I didn’t even know it fell until I heard it hit the ground and saw it laying there.”

After Kessler had made a few fruitless attempts to scrape along the knobby walls using the pointed toes of his metal feet, Harvey tried something revolutionary: He turned Kessler’s feet around 180 degrees.

On her next climb, Strock reached the rock’s apex and slapped her hand defiantly on its top.

“It’s definitely a cool feeling to know that I’m still able to do some of the stuff that I had fun with before,” Strock said after descending.

A fellow vet told Strock she was the first female double-amputee vet to reach the top of the wall

“Oh that was nothing,” she replied. “I can do that in my sleep.”

“This was exactly what Marissa needed to boost her confidence,” Vanessa Kessler said about Strock.

“Climbing, in general, empowers you as a human being. Climbing now, for them, empowers them on a completely different level,” Vanessa said. “It shows them that they can do whatever they want.

“When they woke up and their legs were gone, every single thing that they ever knew was gone,” she continued. “And all of these things, all the rehab and the climbing and the fishing and the skiing help them take steps to get a visualization of who they’re going to be now.”

Vanessa watched as her husband dug in with the fat heels of his prosthetic legs, zigzagging his way up the craggy surface of a 50-foot wall. She fell silent for a moment.

“I knew from the beginning that something amazing would come out of this. I didn’t know how; I still don’t know what that looks like,” she said. “But every time that we do one of these events, it helps me get a little bit more clarity on what that means.”

As Kessler fought to nearly halfway up the rock, Vanessa brushed a tear from her eye.

“Some say that things like this happen only to people that can handle them. Jake is one of those people,” she said.

“He just has this light about him that you can see,” she explained. “I don’t really know where it comes from; it’s just part of him.”

If Vanessa had been told before Kessler’s accident that he would be here climbing a rock with the heels of prosthetic feet, “It wouldn’t have surprised me at all,” she said. “My husband is one of the strongest, most persevering human beings I’ve ever met. If somebody said he would be climbing Everest in 10 years, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”

Kessler, visibly exhausted, climbed just above the halfway point when he asked to be lowered down.

“It’s amazing knowing that you can get out and still do the same things you did before,” Kessler said after his climb. “It helps a lot that there are positive people around me, encouraging me whether I make it to the top or halfway up.

“There’s no such thing as a bad climb,” he said.

Vanessa pushed Kessler’s wheelchair to him and offered a seat to the worn-out soldier.

“Every step in this is just another piece of what our lives are going to look like now,” Vanessa said. “And every new thing that he accomplishes reinforces the fact that we’re going to be OK.